The mystery of Max Klatt tested some of Britain’s finest minds and found no convincing answer. Among those puzzling over its complexity were Gilbert Ryle, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper who officially investigated and recorded The Last Days of Hitler, and Klop Ustinov.

Professor Ryle, who had been recalled from Oxford in February 1946 to continue his wartime MI6 duties, teamed up with Klop to conduct the interrogations. They made an unlikely combination: the tall, slim scholar and the short, pugnacious spy. Ryle had taught himself German well enough to read the major philosophers in their own language but preferred to conduct the interviews in English with Klop adopting the more neutral role of interpreter, usually purporting to be a born and bred Englishman using his usual pseudonym of ‘Mr Johnson’ rather than giving away his original German nationality.

The existence of Max Klatt had been known to British intelligence since 1941, thanks once again to the cryptographers at Bletchley Park. In June that year, they began to decipher radio traffic picked up between the Klatt organisation in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and the Vienna office of German military intelligence, the Abwehr.

It was immediately clear that this was a major intelligence asset for the German Army. Daily reports flowed in from all over the Soviet Union and British operations in the Middle East and North Africa. By the end of the war Bletchley had dealt with more than 5,000 Klatt communications. Not only did they appear to come from many locations, they were extraordinarily up-to-date, sometimes reporting events on the day they happened. That implied that reports must be transmitted by radio yet the listeners could find no evidence of incoming radio messages from agents in the field to the collator at the centre of the web in Sofia. There was the additional mystery of why the network was based in Sofia, transmitting information huge distances, only to relay it back as a package to Vienna and then back to Berlin.245

The traffic was split into two main groups: Max and Moritz. Max appeared to have agents everywhere from Leningrad, 1,300 miles to the north, down to Batumi on the eastern edge of the Black Sea, on through Azerbaijan to the Iranian capital, Tehran, and then on to Baghdad in Iraq, 1,300 miles to the south. Initially MI5 and MI6 were more concerned with Moritz, whose sphere of operations extended from Syria and Palestine down through Egypt into Libya.246 It appeared that the Germans had a mole inside General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army as he sought to turn the tide against the Panzer divisions of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the Western Desert.

Gradually the analysts came to the conclusion that the Moritz material was low-grade intelligence, often inaccurate and capable of being compiled by any well-informed observer.

The Max traffic, however, gave the appearance of being genuine, detailed and immensely valuable to the German high command. It provided information about shipping convoys and troop movements, planned offensives and situation reports from the siege of Stalingrad. With some trepidation, the Joint Signals Intelligence Committee, with representatives from MI5, MI6 and GC&CS (the Government Code and Cipher School) decided to alert the Russians to what looked like a horrendous security failure on their part. Their representative in Moscow, Cecil Barclay – Sir Robert Vansittart’s stepson – was authorised to give a guarded account of the intercepts. This carried the risk that the Klatt operation would quickly realise the Russians had been tipped off. The codebreakers were not about to share the secret of Enigma, the German encryption method that they had broken, with their Communist allies. They were not to know that Russia’s own double agents, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, were assiduously filing every detail back to Moscow anyway.

Additionally, a suspicion was forming in the minds of some in MI5 and MI6 that what they were seeing might be a huge deception operation by the Russians, deliberately feeding false intelligence, laced into genuine information, back to Germany. Britain was already doing the same thing. Cecil Barclay got a surprising response: bitter complaints that the British had been holding out on their allies. More surprising still, nothing happened. The Klatt operation carried on as before; apparently the Russians had done nothing to plug the leaks.

When President Yeltsin ordered the partial release of Russian Intelligence Service archives in the early 1990s it emerged that the NKVD and the counter-intelligence service Smersh had investigated Klatt but had not produced a final report until 1947. They concluded that the Klatt reports contained only 8 per cent genuine intelligence, that the agent names were fictional and that no radio network existed. They did not explain where the genuine intelligence had come from.247

Nevertheless, at the time the British concluded that the Klatt operation was genuine. This belief was fuelled by interrogation of captured German agents, in particular Mirko Rot, a Yugoslav Jew whose parents were among those massacred by the Hungarians in Novi Sad in 1942. He and his wife had narrowly escaped the same fate and he had trained as a German agent with the deliberate intention of getting sent undercover to an Allied country where he could defect. His opportunity came when he was posted to Lisbon and made contact with the First Secretary in the British embassy, Peter Garran. He was able to identify some of the Klatt agents, among them Willi Goetz, who was based in Turkey, and Elie Haggar, the 23-year-old son of an Egyptian policeman. Haggar had been recruited while studying chemistry at university in occupied France and was tracked by MI5 as he made his way home via Sofia, where he was briefed by the Klatt team. He was intercepted by the British in Palestine and interned. But the Moritz traffic continued. MI5 suspected that it might be the work of the correspondent of Tass, the Russian news agency, attached to the British forces.

More significantly, Mirko Rot gave MI5 Klatt’s real name: Richard Kauder. He had met Kauder’s mother, visited his flat at 15 Skobelev Boulevard, and knew about his mistresses in Sofia and Budapest. Klatt managed to operate independently of the local Abwehr office, which treated him with suspicion. Instead he made himself the most valuable supplier of intelligence to the Abwehr in Vienna. Rot was aware that the Klatt signals were highly valued. The Stalingrad reports had been of enormous help to the air force and led to the Russians suffering great losses. Rot also revealed that one channel of communication was a White Russian – someone who would be willing to see Germany triumph in his homeland to rid it of the scourge of communism.248

He identified this source as General Anton Turkul and was later able to describe how, in July 1943, Kauder had personally flown to Rome, accompanied by Turkul’s head of intelligence Ira Lang, to persuade Turkul to flee to Budapest before the Allies invaded Italy.

Klop was briefed at an early stage on the Rot revelations so that he could run them past Agent Harlequin – the German Major Richard Wurmann – whom he had interrogated at his country home in Gloucestershire and who was now conveniently located in a neighbouring flat in Chelsea Cloisters. Wurmann could not help but Klop kept in close touch with developments and sought the help of his old friend Eugen Sabline for background on General Turkul.

Turkul, born in 1892 in Odessa in the Ukraine, was the son of an engineer and had enlisted as a private in the Imperial Russian Army at the outbreak of the First World War, rising to the rank of captain. Promotion came even more rapidly with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Turkul joined the White Russian resistance army in Poland and so distinguished himself that he was appointed general of an infantry division. When it became clear that the rebels were doomed to fail, Turkul, like 160,000 of his countrymen, fled to Turkey. As they then dispersed around Europe during the 1920s, he had eked out a living as a clerk in a sugar factory in Serbia, spent some time in Sofia and then become part of the exile community in Paris. He struggled to make ends meet, running a petrol station and a restaurant and taking in lodgers. He remained active in the many anti-Communist movements, wrote a book about his military experiences and, as he later confessed, was paid money by the Japanese – who were in constant conflict with the Soviets in the East – to infiltrate anti-Communist agitators back into Russia.249

All of this made some sense. Here was a right-wing White Russian intelligence organisation with extensive contacts still inside the Soviet Union. Their concern was not to rid Europe of Adolf Hitler; it was to rid Russia of Joseph Stalin, almost at any price. The opportunity to test this theory came with end of the war and the arrest of Kauder, Turkul and Ira Lang.

On 24 May 1945, Kauder was arrested by the Americans in their control zone in Vienna and the remains of his network were rolled up by the simple expedient of sending out a coded message to them in Kauder’s name summoning them to a meeting. As they arrived they were arrested. British intelligence regarded him as a priority target but for more than a year they were prevented by the Americans from seeing him.

Kauder was questioned at length at the American interrogation centre in Salzburg. The master spy was only 5ft 6in. tall and weighed nearly 13 stone (82 kilos); he was stout, slow-moving, with a round, friendly face and smooth grey hair. He was Jewish by birth but had converted with his parents to Roman Catholicism under the pressure of rampant anti-Semitism in turn-of-the-century Vienna. His motivations for working for the Nazis were thought to be money and fear. He was paid large sums of money to meet the expenses of his supposed agent network but he still faced discrimination because of his background. At one point the Abwehr were forced to stop using him because of an order from Hitler that they should not employ non-Aryans. Kauder’s mother was living in Vienna at the outbreak of war and he was anxious that she should be protected from persecution. His father, who had been a medical officer in the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, was dead.

There were plans to bring him to London but in March 1946 he attempted suicide and it was decided that he was not in a fit state to travel. It was July before Gilbert Ryle was able to see him in Salzburg but by then the Americans had provided a full background, running to more than seventy pages and listing all his Abwehr contacts and code names of his agents.

When Gilbert Ryle saw Richard Kauder he quickly came to the conclusion that the earlier suspicion that the Klatt organisation was a Soviet double-cross had been well founded. The key was Ira Lang, Turkul’s intelligence chief. It became clear that he controlled virtually all the incoming traffic for the Klatt organisation and was extremely secretive about his sources. Lang was supposedly the son of a Czech father and a Russian mother and had grown up in Krasnodar in southern Russia, trained for the military at cavalry school but after the revolution had fought on the White Russian side under General Anton Denikin. Thereafter he had studied law in Prague, never qualified but worked for a Hungarian law firm. He had been jailed in Budapest for spreading anti-government propaganda and that was where he met Kauder, who was also briefly in jail because of irregularities in his travel documents. Lang led Kauder to believe that his intelligence sources were White Russians who had infiltrated the Soviet military command.

Ryle found it incredible that this network could have operated from 1941 to 1945, filing daily reports, without the Russians discovering it. And since he knew that the Russians had been told about Klatt, it was even more incredible that they took no action to close him down. He noted, too, that Turkul and Lang, who had not been under arrest in Salzburg in the immediate post-war period, seemed quite unconcerned that the Russians might try to kidnap them to answer for their duplicity. Yet the Russians had attempted to snatch Kauder from under the noses of the Americans and when that failed they tried to capture his mistress and hold her hostage. That too was thwarted. Ryle concluded that both Turkul and Lang knew they were safe because they had been working for the NKVD, the Russian secret police, forerunner of the KGB. He drew attention to the fact that Turkul had been expelled from France in 1938 after being implicated in the kidnap and disappearance of the White Russian leader in Paris, General Evgeni Miller. British intelligence had also been told, pre-war, by the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, that it was NKVD policy to infiltrate the rebel White Russian movement and control it from within.

Ryle concluded that far from running a network, Lang was being run by the NKVD. There had not been any two-way radio traffic, just a blind feed – a broadcast which Lang could pick up on any radio set and decode before recasting it in a series of ‘headlines’ to Richard Kauder who then recreated it as text to give to the Germans. Ryle suspected that the broadcast was powerful enough to be received by General Turkul in his Rome headquarters, and that Turkul had been selling it on to Mussolini, thereby doubling the income which kept him and his ‘Anti-Communist Union’ afloat.

That would explain why Kauder and Lang had to rescue Turkul from Rome before Mussolini was deposed. They feared that the whole operation would be exposed. Ryle was not convinced that the NKVD was deliberately feeding the Germans disinformation. He thought their sole objective was to control Turkul and through him all anti-Communist organisations. Turkul admitted, under questioning, that he had set out to undermine rival White Russian groups.

This was how Ryle explained his scenario:

Ryle’s hypothesis convinced his colleagues back in London and on 28 August a small group gathered in the office of Major Tar Robertson, who had coordinated Britain’s Double-Cross operation which so successfully deceived the Nazis with disinformation. Robertson and his colleague Joan Chenhalls were hosts to Commander Win Scott and Sam Bossard of the OSS, the American forerunner of the CIA. They agreed that Turkul and Lang should be arrested and brought to London for questioning. Halfway through the meeting Kim Philby, head of counter-intelligence at MI6, rang to say new information was coming in from the French secret service lending credence to the idea that Klatt was a Soviet front.251

Turkul and Lang were to be held in Brixton prison but taken each day for questioning at an MI5 safe house, Flat 19, Rugby Mansions, a red-brick four-storey block in Bishop King’s Road, Kensington, a side street opposite the Olympia exhibition centre. It had previously been used to question Mirko Rot. Miss Chenhalls made the arrangements and explained to the housekeeper that the visitors were not prisoners, they were very important people who were visiting secretly and would be accompanied at all time by people ‘who were looking after them’. Privately, she noted that the sitting room and dining room gave out on to a balcony and the guards would have to be careful that neither of their guests attempted suicide. Her biggest headache, though, was to get them ration cards so that they could be provided with food.252

It was agreed that Gilbert Ryle should conduct the interviews with Klop – ‘Mr Johnson’ – as interpreter. They would start in friendly fashion, seeking better knowledge of the Abwehr, and then turn up the heat. The interviews with Turkul took place on Thursday 19 September and the following day.

By the end of the questioning of Turkul and Ira neither man had broken down or confessed to being a Soviet agent but Ryle was confident that they had let slip enough to confirm that the Max/Moritz traffic was ‘an up-to-date form of Trojan Horse’. He added:

There is no room for doubt that the NKVD supplied Ira with military intelligence of as high veracity as could be achieved in order that he might secure from the Abwehr in return for these golden eggs the funds, the immunity from surveillance, the communications and the travel permits necessary for the prosecution of the covert-pro-Soviet operations of Turkul’s organisation.253

Turkul had accepted under interrogation that Ira must have been foist upon him in 1940 by the NKVD. Questioned separately, Ira consistently denied the allegation, mocking it and offering to go on trial as a war criminal if they had enough evidence. The interview with him had started badly. He had a glass eye which was somehow damaged shortly after his arrival in London and the interrogators had to find a specialist who could replace it.254 Ira’s answers did nothing to illuminate the picture. He and Turkul confirmed that they had sought to undermine other White Russian groups working in Germany’s interests. They attributed this to factional rivalry; Ryle put it down to NKVD instructions. He was firmly of the opinion that the principal object of the NKVD was to penetrate and control anti-Communist White Russian groups.

Klop agreed with the overall analysis but believed that there was two-way traffic, masterminded by Ira. He used the White Russians to supply the Germans with disinformation and to obtain intelligence on German responses which he could feed back to Russia. Turkul had been an insignificant figurehead who chose not to realise the obvious – that he was being used by Ira. In Klop’s wonderfully mixed metaphor: ‘The Trojan Horse had the head of an ostrich which it buried in the sands of the Campagna Romana.’255

There were other undercurrents that tended to confirm Ryle and Klop in their suspicions. According to Otto Wagner, head of the Abwehr office in Sofia, he had always regarded Klatt as a ‘Nachrichtenschwindler’, an intelligence fraud and a Soviet agent. Wagner reported that one wall of Klatt’s office was covered with a map of the USSR west of the Urals, with a small light near each major city. Whenever Wagner or another Abwehr officer visited Klatt, one or more lights flashed repeatedly, whereupon Klatt would exclaim, for example: ‘Ah! A report from Kiev has just come in.’256 Wagner was unimpressed, and complained that Klatt was a Soviet plant, but he had twice been overruled by the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris.

The SS General Walther Schellenberg, who replaced Canaris as head of the Abwehr, was another admirer of Klatt’s network. In his memoirs he wrote:

Turkul also had connections with Claudius Voss, who had run a White Russian intelligence unit out of Sofia through the 1920s and 1930s. Voss, like Turkul, had been suspected of involvement in the kidnap and disappearance of the White Russian leader General Miller by agents of the NKVD. He had served in a German naval unit during the war. Post-war both Turkul and Voss had worked for the Americans in Vienna, purporting to identify Russian Communist infiltrators. And, as Klop no doubt knew, both had pre-war links to MI6. They had been recruited in the 1920s in Paris by Dick Ellis, whose brother-in-law was a White Russian. Ellis was later suspected of selling information to the Germans and the Russians.258 Voss claimed to have carried on working for MI6 through the Gibson brothers, Alfred and Harold, who ran agents in Eastern Europe. He added that one of his men, Michael Skoblikov, had been executed in 1941 for spying for the British.259 Not that working for the British and the Russians were mutually incompatible, as amply demonstrated by the MI6 officer overseeing Klop and Ryle’s investigation – Kim Philby, KGB agent.

In October 1946, the decision to bring Turkul and Lang to London for interrogation was reported to Prime Minister Clement Attlee by the new director of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe.

Ostensibly, General Turkul, who was in control of many groups of genuine White Russians, was exploiting these forces in German interests. In actual fact he was controlling these groups on behalf of the Russian NKVD and betraying them to the Soviet, whenever it seemed profitable to do so. … The case is of special interest, as it shows the total disregard of human life by the Soviet authorities when they feel that a major issue is at stake.260

Although the evidence that Klatt was a Russian front was mounting, it was still not conclusive and Klop was sent urgently to Switzerland to see Turkul’s one-time secretary, George Leonidovitch Romanoff. This Rasputin lookalike had taken refuge in Geneva at the end of the war and entered Holy Orders. He was about to leave for a new life as a priest in Argentina. Klop was greeted in Switzerland by two old friends: the MI6 head of station Nicholas Elliott, who put him up in his apartment, and Paul Blum, Elliott’s opposite number at the American Office of Strategic Studies. Klop and Blum had become friends as part of the Schellenberg interrogation team. He had already questioned Romanov and was keeping an eye on him.

Romanov had travelled all over Europe on Turkul’s behalf, visiting the leading German expert on the Soviet Union, Gustav Hilger, in Berlin and the former Chancellor and wartime ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen. He freely admitted that his purpose was to advance the cause of White Russians through the Nazis and that was how he came to detest Ira. He denounced him to Turkul as a Soviet agent but in the ensuing power struggle it was Romanov who was forced out. He told Klop: ‘Ira’s main occupation was lying. Ira always lied, even when it was not necessary. He distorted everything, even lies.’

Klop, who had not expected to like Romanov, found himself warming to a man who had lived successfully for so long on his wits. By the end of the interview Klop was addressing him as ‘mon père’ and Father George gave Klop a signed photo, acknowledging engagingly that he was bound to need it for secret service records. He also remarked that for a man who claimed he did not speak Russian, Klop’s pronunciation of the names of people and places was remarkably fluent.261

Gilbert Ryle was pleased with Klop’s efforts and there was a growing feeling that what they were looking at was an NKVD operation which would have continuing significance in the Cold War. Michael Serpell wrote an assessment for MI5’s director general Percy Sillitoe, based in part on information provided by Wilhelm Flicke, head of the German equivalent of Bletchley Park. He had analysed the ‘sensational’ success of the Rote Drei, an NKVD ‘ring of three’ in Switzerland who consistently provided the Russians with accurate intelligence on German intentions on the Eastern Front. The Germans had gradually realised what was going on and a witch hunt against hundreds of their own people ensued as they tried to find the traitors. Serpell saw a direct parallel with the Klatt organisation. He believed that Klatt fed information to the Germans and used their responses to analyse their intentions and tactics. Serpell thought the fruits of their research were fed back to Moscow through the Rote Drei. He compared Klatt to Agent Garbo, Britain’s most successful double agent who completely misled the Germans about the location of the D-Day landings. Garbo had been used in the same way: he fed information to the Germans, under British control, and his British controllers analysed the German responses for clues to their intentions. Britain had the advantage that it could track the German responses to Garbo’s disinformation using the Enigma decrypts.

At the beginning of 1947 it was decided that Klop must have one more try at cracking the Klatt case. He was sent back to Camp King, the American military interrogation centre at Oberursel just north of Frankfurt and told to make ‘a direct and unreserved attack on Klatt as a Soviet agent’.

He was to team up once more with the American interrogator Arnold Silver, who went on to a senior position in the CIA. Silver had already had several attempts at getting Kauder to tell the truth. He and his Hungarian mistress were under guard in a comfortable house on the camp’s perimeter and appeared unaware that every room was bugged. Klatt’s off-the-cuff remarks to his woman friend were often more revealing than his answers to direct questions.

Silver was not at first impressed by Klop’s interrogation technique. He complained that Klop had tried to intimidate Kauder by leading him to believe that unless he told the whole truth immediately he would be handed over to the Russians. This, said Silver dismissively, made no impression on Kauder, who simply regurgitated stories he had already told. He and Klop subjected Kauder to hours of intensive questioning during which he refused to confess. Then, in a prearranged move, Klop ordered Kauder out of the room and he was marched away under armed guard, not to his mistress in their comfortable house but to a stark cell. The implication must have been clear enough. An hour later Kauder tried to hang himself. He had written a suicide note maintaining that he had told the truth and never suspected that Ira was a Soviet stooge. He was cut down and given a few hours to recover before being brought back the interrogation room. Still in a semi-coma induced by sleeping pills he had taken as part of the suicide attempt, finally he admitted that he had realised very early on that he was being fed Soviet disinformation but dare not admit it because his income would dry up and there would be terrible reprisals from the Germans. In this vulnerable state he was required to confront Ira and attempt to get him to confirm that he had been working for the Soviets all along. It didn’t work, but it did serve to convince Klop and Silver that Ira was running rings round Kauder and had been for years. Klop then had another go at breaking Ira and got five different stories out of him in the space of an hour, all of which were dismissed as fiction.262

Silver was dismissive about Kauder’s co-conspirators. He said later:

Turkul was a useless oaf who had lent his name to the Klatt network as the man who allegedly recruited sources in the USSR. He never recruited even one source … Ira Longin was an intelligent liar who could spin off sixty cover stories in as many minutes.263

Since there were no longer grounds to detain them, Kauder, Turkul and Ira Lang were released in mid-1947. Kauder continued to masquerade as a spymaster, offering his non-existent Soviet networks to visiting CIA men to no avail. Klop returned to London apparently full of admiration for the way Silver and his team were operating at Camp King. According to Silver, Klop told a colleague that the operation at Oberursel was the most professional intelligence and counter-intelligence interrogation centre he had ever seen.

And yet, whatever Silver’s opinions really were, General Turkul continued to operate as a source of Soviet intelligence for the Americans. FBI special agents working in Germany had convinced themselves that Turkul was one of the few White Russians genuinely opposed to the Soviet regime. They complained about his arrest and interrogation, insisted he had their complete confidence, and re-employed him when he was released. Later investigation has confirmed that Turkul was supplying Mussolini, but more importantly in the longer term, he was an agent of Vatican intelligence in their behind-the-scenes determination to stem the tide of Communism. He had been involved in the 1930s in Intermarium, sponsored by MI6 among others, an organisation whose objectives included a Catholic alliance of East Europeans opposed to Communism.264

Post-war, the Americans attached Turkul to Reinhard Gehlen’s espionage unit. Gehlen had been head of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front and a regular recipient of the Max Klatt organisation’s traffic during the war. Now he was working for the Allies, recruiting many of his former comrades, in the Cold War offensive against the Soviet Union. He became effectively head of the West German Intelligence service until increasing evidence that his organisation had been penetrated by Soviet agents, including Turkul, led to his downfall in 1968.

It surely must have astonished Klop, as he observed the blunders that beset Western Intelligence services in the early stages of the Cold War, that such people continued to prosper when he had so comprehensively debunked their reputations.